Walking in from the garage, Mike took a deep breath, to cleanse himself from the stress of the day. Even a slow day at a job that people envied for it's simplicity left his neck aching and his head pounding from tension. The pains that held court in his mind never let him relax and it took it's toll on his body. At twenty-two years old, he worried about blood pressure and the threat of a heart attack. Both problems ran in his family, and his oversized body escalated the risk to ridiculous levels, and he knew it.
Stepping onto the rust colored tiles of the dining room that he had grow up seeing as the center of his little universe, he flipped the kitchen light on. The glass covering the bulb was both old and stained by the tar from decades of his grandparents smoking at the nearby counter. It cast a light filtered into yellowness, but he found it comfortingly familiar, not the intense shadowless flouescent light most places were illuminated by.
The house seemed especially silent to his ears after the loud heavy metal that had been blaring in the car on the way from dropping his friend Andy off at home. It had seemed too quiet, though, for the last two months, since both the family dog and then a matter of days later, his grandmother had both died. The warmth that his grandmother had lent to the home had long ago faded way, leaving simply a house behind. What passed for a relationship with his grandfather offered as much comfort as a November rain. A muted thumping of his keys landing on the wooden table in the center of the dining room broke the silence of the house, as he walked toward the entrance to the hall.
His room waited beyond, and he took in a deep breath. The next moment was always his favorite and most important of the day. He ran both hands back through his hair as he stepped onto the gray carpeting of the hallway, the red color that he hated so much fading away. It gave way to a darkish blonde color, thickening and growing a little longer. The scruffy beard that a lack of interest in hygene allowed fell out, disappearing before it touched the floor, leaving behind smooth skin and more delicate lines.
Opening the door to the bedroom, his hand was so big that it seemed to dwarf the knob. Before he had even stepped all the way into the room, though, Mike reached down for the hem of his black t-shirt to pull it off. As it came up, a smaller, more slender form was revealed. The awkward size giving way to soft breasts and a graceful build. One foot freed it's twin from a shoe, then the process was repeated. Each heel rubbed against the other to ease the white sweatsocks off as well. The baggy pair of black jeans were opened and dropped away next, unveiling pale, hairless legs. Finally, Roxy let out her sigh and was able to drop the cherade.
With a big toe, Roxy turned her PC on by poking at the button on the front of it's black and silver tower, the multi-colored lights up the sides of the face coming on as the fans hummed to life. The girl plopped down into the low-backed leather chair before the desk cluttered with toys from Final Fantasy and Resident Evil. With the glow of the monitor, Roxy leaned back in her seat and rubbbed at her neck with one hand, whimpering gently at the intense pain that coursed through the tense muscles.
While checking websites and starting up some music via WinAmp, she couldn't help but muse to herself about the nature of her existence. She knew she was more real than Mike, because his personality was her's seen through a filter of lies and half-truths. Yet, by the same token, most people would never see her as the factual side of the duality, because the physical body was undoubtedly his. She looked down at herself, sighing and touching the top of her chest with a palm. She knew that even though here, in this sanctuum, she was as feminine as any other girl, if she stepped outside, she would be able to see nothing but his broad, coarse haired chest. The idea revolted her, as it had for years.
Seeing that her AIM buddy list was devoid of any friendly names, the few miracle relationships in her life that allowed her to disregard the harsh reality outside of the room, she sighed in frustration. Nights like this were the ones where she needed people like Brian and Brittney most, the people who had come to care for her away from the costume she lived in. With a heavy heart, she climbed up to her feet long enough to flop to herself, allowing her body to fall limply onto the large bed that dominated the majority of the room. With the cool, cheetah patterned sheets beneath her, her blue-green eyes settled upon the uneven patterns of bumpy popcorn on the ceiling.
A small hand came to rest on the cool, baby-blue paint of the wall beside the bed, a handful of inches below the white sill of the bedroom's window. The view out it wasn't much when blinds the color of dried blood were pulled up. Mainly, she could see a cinderblock wall and the neighboring house only ten feet away. The angle she was laying at, though, allowed her a glimpse of the stars above and the velvety dark night sky. Her other hand reached up and across her body, toward the screen over the window, and to the sky beyond. The familiar ache that signaled her wanting to cry began in the back of her throat, as her eyes began to burn a little. "I wish someone could see me and reach back," the girl whispered. As cliche' as it sounded, she felt so isolated and lost. In a way, this unfocused gaze up into the sky was the only time Roxy was able to see the outside world.
With a shake of her head, Roxy sat up. "So fucking weak," she muttered to herself. It always turned on her like this, an endless cycle of feeling sorry for herself and then despising herself for allowing it to come to that. So many people had told her over the years that she should be proud and learn to accept and cope with her peculiar existence. None of those people, though, had ever had to deal with the kind of mindrending isolation and pain that her life brought her. They couldn't fathom what it felt like to spend your entire life trapped in the wrong body.
Kicking her legs back over the edge of the bed, Roxy decided that she needed to distract herself again. Using Final Fantasy XI for that had long since begun to fail her, as politics inside of the game upset her and the endless competition with her friends on who was the best at the game made her feel uncomfortable. She ended up hating herself for taking pride in her few meager accomplishments she had made in the year of her life thrown away escaping into the world of vana'diel. Television never helped for long, as the same mindless drivel always turned into infomercials, which did nothing to keep her mind from wandering.
Looking down at the massive tangle of razor-blade scars that decorated her right arm, Roxy reached up to run her fingers over the rippling surface of her skin there. A fresh mark was still healing there, the skin scabbed over. Her nails dug into the scab to rip it away, some small way for her to fight back against Mike's ponderous form, by marking it up. The little trickle of blood from the cut, though, sent a sting of pain through her heart. Roxy had promised someone she once loved very deeply that she would never cut into her flesh again, a promise she held sacred long after the love was destroyed. The promise, though, like all things, eventually faded away. Now, cutting herself held two meanings, not only an attack on the body she was trapped in, but a reminder of the fact that she was alone in a way most people would never be able to fathom. Unable to ever be comfortable among men, and unable to ever be accepted among other women.
The dark thoughts that seemed to be rampaging through her mind were starting to become too much for her. The sting of tears in her eyes made Roxy sniffle, as she rubbed the back of an arm over her eyes. Crying bothered her more than almost anything else. It was an embarassing action, to give in to her self-pity and mourn for the misfortune of her own life. She always tried to remind herself that people had it worse than her. She had a place to live, and never went hungry. Yet her own personal brand of torment was hers, and so it was truly impossible to ever forget it. The wound in one's own body is always more painful than someone else's after all. Even if she felt less than human sometimes, such human fallicies couldn't be escaped.
Reaching up above the head of her bed, Roxy carefully plucked up her stuffed bunny. She hugged the fluffy white rabbit close to her chest, his head under her chin and nuzzled down against him. The little bunny had been a gift from her friend Brian, perhaps the person who first truly came to respect and care for her as a young woman. She had once cried to him that she wished she had someone to hold her at night, and so a few days later, a box with the white rabbit in it had arrived.
With bunny clutched close to her, Roxy reached down and tugged her sheet up over her body. Her room was to warm for any blankets, something that she usually loved in the winter. So she was content to snuggle up under the clean smelling sheet. One arm was curled tightly around her bunny, and the other tucked beneath the pillow beneath her head. With Iron Chef babbling away on the television near the foot of the bed, she closed her eyes, listening to talk of Sakai's skill as she slowly tuned the world out to escape into her dreams, the only other place she felt free.